First, a distinction worth keeping straight
Chuck Conboy, the America First Party candidate for U.S. Senate, is not a super PAC — he's a candidate with his own campaign committee, filing under his own name. A super PAC is different: an independent group that can raise and spend unlimited money on ads, as long as it doesn't coordinate directly with a campaign. This page is about those groups — the ones spending money around the candidates, not the candidates' own committees.
Two races are live in Nebraska right now: U.S. Senate (Pete Ricketts vs. Dan Osborn, plus three other certified candidates) and Governor (Jim Pillen vs. Lynne Walz, plus Brett Lindstrom running third-party and others). Outside money is already moving in the Senate race specifically. Here's what's checkable today.
The money on the board right now
| Group | Lean | Race | Amount | Date | What it's spending on |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Win It Back PAC (Club for Growth-affiliated) | R | NE-SEN, vs. Osborn | $2,000,000 | 2026-09-09 | Statewide broadcast/satellite/streaming ad on immigration and Social Security, quoting Osborn: "Let's give 'em a damn Social Security card already" |
| Cornhusker Majority | R (per Axios reporting) | NE-SEN, vs. Osborn | $1,400,000 | 2026-09-15/17 | Omaha, Lincoln, Sioux City markets. Content not yet independently confirmed — see the box below. |
| The Working Class Heroes Fund (Dan Osborn's own PAC) | Neither | Not race-specific | Not disclosed here | Launched Nov. 2024 | States it backs working-class candidates "of all parties" — not aimed at either 2026 Nebraska race specifically |
Source: Club for Growth, 2026-09-09; Axios, 2026-09-15; NBC News, 2024-11
What we looked for and couldn't get today
Nebraska's own campaign finance system — the Accountability and Disclosure Commission's FirstTuesday database — is where a super PAC operating on the state side (the governor's race) or accepting Nebraska-based money would actually show up, filed by its own name, in its own words. We went to check it directly rather than rely on news coverage alone.
We ran three separate searches on Nebraska's committee search tool (nadc-e.nebraska.gov) on 2026-09-18 at approximately 21:16 UTC: "Cornhusker," "Win It Back," and — as a control, to rule out our own search terms being the problem — "Pillen," a name we already know is in the system from an earlier page on this site. All three returned the identical error: "Unknown SQL Database Exception has occurred." A fourth search using a single letter, "a," which should return hundreds of results if the tool were working, returned the same error.
- Committee Name search, "name contains Cornhusker" — SQL exception
- Committee Name search, "name contains Win It Back" — SQL exception
- Committee Name search, "name contains Pillen" (control, known to exist) — SQL exception
- Committee Name search, "name contains a" (single letter, should return many results) — SQL exception
That's not us failing to find something — that's the state's own public search tool being unavailable to anyone trying to use it at that time. It's a fact worth publishing on its own. We'll try again and update this box when the tool is back.
Because of that outage, we have not yet independently confirmed: (1) whether Cornhusker Majority or Win It Back PAC are registered with Nebraska specifically or operate purely at the federal level for this Senate race, (2) who funds Cornhusker Majority, or (3) whether the Republican Governors Association or Democratic Governors Association have moved any money into the 2026 Nebraska governor's race yet. All three are open questions, not closed ones.
What's actually on the record
Two Republican-aligned super PACs have put $3.4 million into ads against one candidate, Dan Osborn, in three weeks — before Nebraska's other Senate candidates, or either candidate in the governor's race, have drawn a comparable outside ad buy that we could find. Osborn has his own PAC, but it's not aimed at either 2026 Nebraska race and isn't a mirror-image counterweight. We tried to check the state's own filing system for the rest of the picture and it was down, not silent — a real, dated fact in its own right.
None of that is our conclusion about who's right on policy. It's what's checkable, dated, and cited, as of today. This page updates as more spending shows up or the state's tool comes back online. #PROOF — trust, but verify.